User blog:King Dragonhoff/Being an Administrator
This guide is to help new administrators, present and future, to become acquainted with their new rank and abilities. What does it mean to be an Administrator? Congratulations, you have proved yourself to be a very well-trusted, knowledgeable, and helpful editor, so you have been promoted to the rank of administrator, but this should be no surprise to you. If the wiki's Staff Members think that you show potential to be a good Staff Member as well, they will contact you to discuss it with you. Administrator is a Wikia rank one step above rollback and one step below bureaucrat. Being promoted to administrator means that you have been recognized for your continued helpfulness and excellent display of editing and community skills and knowledge. It also means that you are on the road to possibly becoming a Bureaucrat one day, so keep up the good work! Administrators will have a silver glow animation applied to their avatar, and links to their user pages will be silver and bolded. What can I do now that I am an Administrator? Being promoted to administrator gives you several new abilities: *Protecting/unprotecting pages (accessed from a page's edit button drop-down) *Editing fully protected pages *Move/Rename pages (since all pages should be fully move protected) *Deleting/restoring pages and files (accessed from a page's edit button drop-down) *Editing pages in the MediaWiki mainspace including CSS and JavaScript files and the wiki's navigation bar *Blocking users who break the Wiki Rules (Can be done from the user's contributions page or ) *Curating the wiki's mobile main page Administrators can also perform the following actions, but a community discussion should take place first: *Toggle (If possible, contact the Staff Member(s) who made the original decision to enable/disable a certain feature to hear their reasons for doing so.) *Customize the Expectations If you are an administrator, you have already shown that you know how to be helpful and constructive around the wiki. Staff Members should set an example for other editors to follow. Remember to continue being friendly and productive. When you become an administrator, you are not required to take on any specific duties. You just do what you can when you can like a regular editor. You are just entrusted with extra tools to allow you to help out with more things when possible. Page Protection Most pages are generally left unprotected in regards to editing. This is a community site, so the community should be able to edit what they want and share their knowledge. Key articles are semi-protected to protect important, high-traffic information. When choosing a protection level for an article in the main namespace, consider the protection level of similar articles on the wiki. Some articles are fully protected because they are considered fully complete or they can only really be modified by adminstrators (For instance, a calculator can only be edited by an administrator because of the protection of any template(s) that the calculator runs and the associated JavaScript files). In regards to page moves, all pages should be set to only be moveable by administrators. Template pages are always fully protected to ensure mass vandalism is prevented. Redirects are always fully protected. Building and Updating Templates Templates alter many pages across the site, so if they are broken, many pages are broken, and as stated above, template pages are always fully protected to ensure mass vandalism is prevented, so building and updating templates is an important responsibility of administrators. The wiki's vital templates will need updating from time to time, so it is important for an administrator to understand what they do and how they work. Wikitext functions are built to be fairly easy to understand. This reference should help one get acquainted with them. Editing MediaWiki Files Of course, not all administrators will know CSS and/or JavaScript syntax. In this case, you should leave these files alone unless you know exactly what you are doing. Even if you do, the best practice is to contact the original author of the code. Removing or modifying code could have unintended consequences across the site if you do not know what all that code affects. Blocking Blocking should be used carefully. Just because someone makes a bad edit does not mean they should be blocked. Contact them on their message wall instead. However, when a person intentionally breaks a rule or vandalizes the wiki, they should be blocked. Block options vary from situation to situation depending on the severity of the offense, but these common block reasons are usually dealt with in the following ways. The duration of the block depends on the severity and intention of the offense. Note that the "Prevent account creation" option is always checked for a block. *Posting "hacks" or "cheats" (AKA, attempting to scam users): Duration: 5 years; prevent user from posting on their own wall; block registered and unregistered users from using the IP address *Spamming or offensive language: Prevent user from posting on their own wall *Vandalism: block registered and unregistered users from using the IP address *Editing for achievements: Prevent user from posting on their own wall; duration of 1 to 3 days *Recruiting-related infractions: The durations for these blocks are defined here. Page Tags Administrators, like rollbacks, should also keep an eye on the condition of pages and add or remove Article management templates when needed. Administrators are experienced editors, so they should know when a page needs or does not need a certain tag. Category:Blog posts